You can run this same analysis at other times and plot member life changes. For example, I know one member who was here a lot but just had a child. My participation waxes and wanes depending upon how close I am to a significant delivery deadline. If you see a significant change you can infer something is going on.

This is another example of why I consider you one of the brightest bulbs on the tree.
Thanks!!!

Thanks @johnpowell. I’ve always imagined it would be quite satisfying to have direct access (read-only of course) to fluther’s db. The amount of analysis and reports we could generate pretty easily would be interesting (to me).

In the earlier thread, I estimated the number of active question askers to be 123. Your data includes both askers and answerers, so it is going to be much longer. The 123rd person in the list is Afos22 with 10 answers/comments. So, my estimate does not account for every user, but accounts for 90% of all activity.

The top 20 users are responsible for 48.8% of all posts. This is a pretty huge percentage.

Using the same estimation procedure I used in the previous thread, we can see how “complete” this list is. My sample size was 140, but this sample size is 9163 (and includes answers). With 9163 posts, 322 users, and 98 people who appeared once:

E = 322 / (1 – 98/9163)
E = 325.677

So, this list is pretty much completely inclusive of all active users, since the measured number of users (322) is about the same as the expected number of users (326).

We could take a larger sample, but doing so would involve sampling older and older threads, at which point the word “active” no longer applies. Eventually, the list would include all 30422 users who have ever answered a thread.

@LuckyGuy :: I have a copy of all the questions ever asked, all 170K of them. Since there are timestamps you could graph a users activity over time. But that is way more work than I would want to do. And it would be so very computationally intensive.

I used GREP to basically pull out every instance that a persons avatar shows up. Then a regex to strip it down to just the username. That is why there are some errors. The thing is GREP starts shitting all over itself at about 10,000 files. I could do it in batches but I don’t care enough.

If anyone wants a zipped file of the HTML for all the questions ever asked I could upload it. It is rather large and would take me a few days.

I don’t think anyone is using the site to much. There is nothing wrong with being at the top of the list. People on the top make solid contributions and are probably responsible for keeping things going.

Correct. When I grabbed the data I pulled in the last 500 questions. It would probably be very different if I redid it now. I know a good chunk of all mine came from only a few questions that might not be in the current last 500.